I'm sure you're all still (sadly) familiar with the recent 'debate' I had with InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy, which detailed a lot of silly things. The seed of that discussion was planted with Kennedy's first article which, among other things, claimed that Windows 7 performed similarly to Windows Vista (meaning, slower than XP). Leaving the thread count discussion behind, Kennedy did include a benchmark which showed that Windows 7 performed similar to Windows Vista. There's a new benchmark out now, comparing a slightly more recent build of Windows 7 to Vista RTM/SP1 and XP SP3, and in these tests, Windows 7 blows all of those out of the water.

And you can easily run Vista on that same P4 1.5Ghz processor, hell you can run it on a 1Ghz processor as long as you have a decent amount of memory (2Gb which is dirt cheap nowadays). It'll run about as well as the latest Ubuntu release does actually...sluggish at times but fine for most useage.

The only thing you need 3-4Ghz for is gaming or rendering or the like.

Ok here we go again I am sure I will have negative numbers marked down but big deal. The truth is ignored and people who do not understand that programs should be built and designed around the least amount of system resources not the famous line below.

The entire theory with Windows and for that instance is this statement...

***'Memory and Disk Space is dirt cheap nowadays'...

Basically this is the excuse for POOR programming and POOR Operating System design you can throw CPU and MEMORY at ANY POORLY coded application and it will work. What happens when an earthquake happens again where the memory is made and it is not made in the United States. The last time this happened the prices sky rocketed so I guess people who have the famous line of 'memory is cheap will have to learn how to program again'...

Also, with all of the hype of green computing I hardly think this line will hold water in the future, when it takes a machine to run with 2 Gigs of ram just to be functional the environmentalist have not latched on to the computing world like the auto world they have brought to its knees.

Why does a operating system for HOME use require 2 GIGS of ram??? Or why does it need 20 GIGS for installation does anyone have a valid reason for this?

I can install CentOS for a desktop and have full functionality with 1G install and 512 of ram the latest release or for that matter RHEL 5 desktop for that matter with all of the programs I need.

The fact is Windows was not built around security plain and simple that is the golden rule of any common sense approach GRANT the least amount of security to get the job done. What Microsoft has accomplished is trying to add a security layer over the top of an operating system that was designed to run as administrator. Microsoft is to blame for the inherit design flaw, Linux/Unix systems do not require users to run as root to do job functions!